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Press Releases in All, 2008

With Mental Health Insurance, Price Matters

Amal Trivedi, M.D.: Research shows that people who need mental health care would be more likely to get it if out-of-pocket costs for mental health and primary care were at the same level.
Brown University professors Amal Trivedi and Vincent Mor have discovered that more patients with mental illness will seek follow-up care after a hospitalization if their co-payments for mental health care are as affordable as for their primary care. (Distributed December 23, 2008)

Brown Physics Professor Wins Prestigious White House Award

Anastasia Volovich: The Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Physics
Anastasia Volovich, the Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Physics, has been named a winner of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. She and other young scientists nationwide were honored at a White House ceremony Dec. 19, 2008. (Distributed December 19, 2008)
New AAAS Fellows

Five Brown Faculty Elected to World’s Largest Scientific Body

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected five Brown University professors — David M. Berson, Mark D. Bertness, John P. Donoghue, Susan A. Gerbi, and Jimmy Xu — as fellows for their significant contributions to the life and physical sciences. (Distributed December 18, 2008)

Life on Mars? Brown-led Research Team Says Elusive Mineral Bolsters Chances

Found: Elusive Martian Mineral: Brown University graduate student Bethany Ehlmann found the elusive mineral carbonate on Mars, bolstering the chances that life may have existed on the red planet and evidence of primitive forms may remain.
A research team led by Brown University has found evidence of a long-sought mineral that shows Mars was home to a variety of watery environments, including regional pockets of neutral or alkaline water. The finding, detailed in the Dec. 19 edition of Science, bolsters the chances that primitive life sprang up in those benign spots. (Distributed December 18, 2008)

Economists See Roots of Income Inequality in Ancestral History

Migration Matrix: Today’s populations on the Eurasian land mass consists almost entirely of indigenous populations, while the Americas and Australia are predominantly populated by descendants of immigrants.
Two Brown University economists have created a new data set that enables them to explain differences in countries’ incomes based on their people’s ancestral histories. They find that where the ancestors of a country’s present population lived some 500 years ago is a significant predictor of economic outcomes today. (Distributed December 16, 2008)

Men Are Red, Women Are Green, Brown Researcher Finds

Male or female?: Test subjects tended to confirm subtle color differences associated with gender. Even when viewing pixelated or distorted images, subjects identified redder images as male and greener images as female. Top left: gender-ambiguous face; top-right: random noise over the ambiguous face; bottom-left: reconstructed male face; bottom-right: reconstructed female face.
Michael J. Tarr, professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown University, has discovered a difference in skin tone associated with gender. His paper, “Gender Recognition of Human Faces Using Color,” is to be published online this week in the journal Psychological Science. It may have have wide implications for research and industry. (Distributed December 8, 2008)

NSF Awards Brown Researchers $2.6 Million for Computer Vision in Archaeology

Apollonia-Arsuf: The Crusader Castle collapsed in the 13th century. Large fragments are now on the beach below; some are under ocean water. New computer-assisted techniques will help reassemble and interpret the archaeological record from broken, dispersed, and missing pieces.
The National Science Foundation has awarded $2.6 million to a Brown University archaeologist and a team of engineers to develop innovative techniques for archaeological excavation, reconstruction, and interpretation using computer vision and pattern recognition. The project is focused at the site of Apollonia-Arsuf, Israel. (Distributed December 3, 2008)

Brown Chemist Finds Gene That Enables Gray Mold to Kill Plant Cells

David Cane: The Krieble Professor of ChemistryCane and colleagues in France and Spain have identified the DNA that gives gray mold its lethal power over useful plants and have devised a way to control the mold naturally.
Brown University chemist David Cane and international colleagues have identified the genetic sequence behind gray mold's killer arsenal. In an ACS Chemical Biology paper, the scientists report that deletion of a single, mastermind gene from gray mold's DNA shuts down its ability to produce toxins that kill cells in more than 200 species of garden and ornamental plants. (Distributed December 1, 2008)

Brown Political Scientist Urges Historic Lessons for Obama’s Health Care Reform

As President-elect Barack Obama sets out to change the nation's health care system, an article co-authored by Brown University political scientist James Morone calls on him to seriously consider lessons from Lyndon Johnson’s historic enactment of Medicare and Medicaid. The article is published in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine. (Distributed November 26, 2008)

Household Exposure to Toxic Chemicals Lurks Unrecognized, Researchers Find

Many women are surprised to learn the extent of personal, in-home contamination caused by exposure to everyday consumer products, according to a team of researchers including Brown University sociologist Phil Brown and 2008 Ph.D. recipient Rebecca Gasior Altman. The study, published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, is one of the first accounts of participants’ responses to learning personal exposure data, research critical to environmental science and public health. (Distributed November 21, 2008)

How Do Bacteria Swim? Brown Physicists Explain

Bacterial Locomotion: Brown physicists have completed the most detailed study of how bacteria such as the single-celled Caulobacter crescentus swim and how that swimming motion is influenced by drag and a phenomenon known as Brownian motion.
Brown University physicists have completed the most detailed study of the swimming patterns of a microbe, showing for the first time how its movement is affected by drag and a phenomenon called Brownian motion. The findings appear online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (Distributed November 19, 2008)

Brown Hosts Exhibitions of Jewish Comic Book Art

Mendy and the Golem, written by Leibel Estrin and drawn by Dovid Sears (1982): Mendy and the Golem was a series of 19 comic books featuring an Orthodox Jewish boy Mendy and his pal Golem.
Two exhibitions exploring Jewish themes in comics and the ways that Jews shaped this popular American art form are on display at Brown University's John Hay Library and the John Nicholas Brown Center Carriage House Gallery. (Distributed November 10, 2008)